Does Your Inbound Marketing Suffer from Outbound Mindset?
Outbound marketing: you go out and solicit your prospects. Inbound marketing: they come to you. And they require different mindsets, different approaches.
I really enjoyed this article on <https://www.sustainablebrands.com/news_and_views/june2012/why-green-consumers-are-leading-inbound-marketing-revolution?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=brandsweekly&utm_campaign=jun21>traditional, marketer-driven outbound (“push”) marketing versus consumer-driven inbound (“pull”) marketing—and it had a really good insight I want to share with you:
Whereas outbound marketing often provided consumers with fantasies (think of Budweiser commercials or luxury car ads,) inbound marketing provides consumers with facts. People aren’t researching and gathering information on what fantasy a company is trying to sell them on, they are researching the efficacy of their products, and (with ever-growing regularity) the social and environmental policies of specific brands.
If you’ve followed me for a while, you know that I’m a huge believer in pull marketing, in putting the consumer in the driver’s seat to actively seek out solutions and find you. All the way back in 1985, when I published my first marketing book, I talked about effective Yellow Pages presence. Yellow Pages was the web browser of its time, a way to seek out and compare all the providers of a service and make a decision based on who could serve you best. By the time I did my most recent (sixth) marketing book, the award-winning and category-best-selling Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, I devoted significant space to inbound/pull strategies, from social media to Internet discussion groups. This kind of marketing is not at all intrusive; in fact, prospects actually welcome it.
But the insight that the reason it works so well is that it’s based in fact rather than fantasy is something I’d never articulated.
Conventional marketing wisdom tells us that emotions do the selling, and intellect serves only to justify the purchase to others.
That may or may not be true for outbound marketing. I’ve always been quite skeptical of that claim; I have said for years that the best selling uses both emotion and rationality, complementing each other. To put it another way, selling is much easier when the buyer has both the need and the desire. Either one by itself is rarely enough to close a purchase.
But it’s certainly not true of inbound marketing. When a prospect comes to you, he or she is presold on the purchase, or at least seriously considering and actively researching how to solve the problem or meet the goal. But the prospect may not be sold on which vendor to use.
This is your opportunity with inbound marketing: to show how your company is the right solution for the already motivated prospect. And here, intellect is often going to trump emotion. That doesn’t mean you eliminate all the emotional appeals—but you make sure they are rooted in an informational approach, and assume that the prospect already knows why he or she wants what you sell.
In last month’s newsletter, I reviewed a book right now that says businesses don’t need to advertise—but it makes a huge exception for directory listings (including Yellow Pages and search engine ads). I was having trouble with that differentiation, until I read this article. Now I finally understand what the authors are getting at: outbound advertising = fantasy, while listings (inbound advertising and marketing) = fact.
I’m not sure I agree, but at least now I see where they’re coming from.
What do you think—and feel—about this?
